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NVIDIA® OptiX™ Ray Tracing Engine

A software development kit for achieving high performance ray tracing on the GPU.

Image courtesy Tom Grammerstorf

The OptiX API is an application framework for achieving optimal ray tracing performance on the GPU. It provides a simple, recursive, and flexible pipeline for accelerating ray tracing algorithms. Bring the power of NVIDIA GPUs to your ray tracing applications with programmable intersection, ray generation, and shading.

From film and games to design and scientific visualization, OptiX has been successfully deployed in a broad swatch of commercial applications. These applications include commercial renderers such as NVIDIA Iray, mental ray, and FurryBall from AAA Studio as well as in-house applications ranging from scientific visualization (including Gordon Bell Award finalists), to defense applications, audio synthesis, and computing lightmaps for games.

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Free for Commercial-Use

OptiX is now free for use within any application. The use and distribution of OptiX commercially is now available royalty-free. Please refer to our standard SDK end-user license agreement for further details.

Hardware Compatibility

OptiX in Action

NVIDIA Iray

NVIDIA Iray employs OptiX technology for optimal performance in both its path tracing and ray tracing render modes. Iray is a state of the art, yet easy to use, photorealistic rendering solution provided as an SDK for seamless integration into custom tools and within industry-leading products from the likes of Dassault Systemes and Siemens PLM.

Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD) is a molecular visualization program for displaying, animating, and analyzing large biomolecular systems using 3-D graphics and built-in scripting. VMD’s preferred rendering mode for both viewport and final render is OptiX, with full VCA support available. The OptiX path renders the highest visual quality and even has a frame rate five times higher than OpenGL on massive datasets.

Image courtesy of VMD, Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

AAA Studios FurryBall

AAA Studios FurryBall is a production-quality, final-frame GPU renderer with advanced rendering techniques. It works as a plugin for Maya and 3ds Max with network rendering and multi-GPU support.
FurryBall RT uses NVIDIA OptiX™ for its physically based, full global illumination renderer that is used both in the interactive viewport and for final frame rendering.

Developer Forums

Resources

OptiX Advanced Samples

This is a set of advanced samples for the NVIDIA OptiX Ray Tracing Engine. They assume some previous experience with OptiX and physically based rendering, unlike the basic tutorial-style samples in the SDK directory of the OptiX 4.0 distribution. They also use some different libraries than the SDK samples; GLFW and imgui in place of GLUT, for example. This means you cannot generally copy one of the advanced samples directly into the SDK, and vice versa.